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life-sciences staff. There was also one lone Waldahud, whom Keith
couldn't quite place. Keith glanced at his watch: 13:59:47. No doubt
whatever was going to happen would begin on time.
"Thank you all for coming," said Boxcar's voice, over
Keith's implant. It was easy to spot her: hers was the only web
flashing. It was eerie, in a way. PHANTOM's translation was piped into
his left acoustic nerve; the other ear heard nothing--even a room this
size full of raucous Ibs would be dead silent.
Boxcar was fifteen meters from where Keith and 'Rissa were standing.
In front of the plated space door, PHANTOM was projecting a giant
hologram of Boxcar, so that all the Ibs could see her flashing web.
Something strange, there: The strands of her web were bright green.
Keith had never seen any Ib's web that color before.
He turned to Rissa, but she must have guessed his question. "It
represents a deeply emotional state," she said.
"Boxcar is choked up over the show of support from her people."
Boxcar's web flashed again. The translation said, "The whole and the
parts--of one, and of them all. The gestalt has resonances on the macro
scale and the micro. It binds."
Obviously, Boxcar was addressing her fellow Ibs. Keith thought he got
the gist of what she was saying--something about being part of the Ib
community having meant as much to her as being a community of parts
herself. Keith prided himself on his acceptance of aliens, his run-ins
with Jag notwithstanding. But this was all a little too surreal for
him; he knew he was about to watch someone die, but the emotions he
should be feeling hadn't yet come to the surface. Rissa, on the other
hand, had that look she got when trying not to cry. She and Boxcar had
been closer than he'd known, Keith realized.
"The road is clear," concluded Boxcar. She rolled several dozen meters
away from the others, out into the center of the bay.
"Why's she doing that?" whispered Keith.
Rissa shrugged her shoulders, but PHANTOM replied into both of their
implants: "During discorporation, components-especially wheels--may
panic, and seek to bond with any other Ib in the area. It is customary
to move far enough away so that if such a thing is attempted, there's
plenty of time to react."
Keith nodded slightly.
And then it began. In the middle of the bay was a standard Ib comfort
mound. Boxcar rolled over it so that the hump supported her frame from
underneath. Her web--visible in PHANTOM's giant hologram--turned an
almost electric purple, another color Keith had never seen before. The
light points at the web's countless intersections grew brighter and
brighter, a dense constellation map with every star a nova.
Then, one by one, the lights winked out. It took perhaps two minutes
for them all to go dark.
Boxcar's frame tipped forward, and her web slid off to the bay floor,
landing in a loose pile. Keith had thought the web was already dead,
but it arched up sharply, as if a fist were pushing it up from
underneath. The strands had now lost all their color; they looked like
thick nylon fishing line.
After a moment, though, the web finally did expire, collapsing into a
heap. Boxcar was now blind and deaf (she had once had a magnetic sense,
too, but that had been neutralized through nanosurgery when she'd left
her home-world; it caused severe disorientation aboard spaceships).
Next, Boxcar's wheels disengaged from the axles on the frame. Wheel
disengaging wasn't unusual in and of itself.
The system that allowed nutrients to pass from the axle into each wheel
didn't provide enough food for the wheels, and in their native
environment they would periodically separate from the rest of the
gestalt for feeding. Thick tendrils, similar to the Ib's bundle of
manipulatory ropes, popped out of the sides of the wheels, preventing
them from falling over (or righting them if they did).
Almost immediately after it separated, the left wheel tried to rejoin
the frame. Just as PHANTOM said it might, it panicked when it realized
that little bumps had risen up all around the axle's circumference,
preventing it from reconnecting.
It rolled around the bay, the grabbing projections around its rim
extending and retracting at a great rate. The wheel had a few vision
sensors of its own, and as soon as it caught sight of the huge
collection of Ibs, it made a beeline for the closest. That Ib spun
away, avoiding the wheel. One of the others--Butterfly, Keith assumed,
the one Ib doctor on board--surged forward, a manipulatory rope
extended, a silver-and-black medical stunner held at its tip. The
stunner touched the wheel, and it stopped moving. It stood for several
seconds, then the rootlike appendages coming out of its sides seemed to
go soft, and the wheel toppled onto its side.
Keith turned his attention back to the center of the bay.
Boxcar's bundle of ropes had slid to the floor, near the discarded
sensor web. They were reaching up to the frame and disengaging the blue
pump from the central green pod, and gently lifting the pump to the
floor. Keith could see the pump's large central breathing orifice
cycling through its usual four-step sequence of open, stretch, compress,
and close. After about forty seconds, though, the sequence started to
get distorted as the pump seemed to lose track of what it was doing. The
orifice movements became jumbled--opening, then immediately compressing;
trying to stretch wide after closing. There was a small gasping
sound--the only sound in the entire bay. Finally the pump stopped
moving.
All that was left was the pod, sitting on the saddle-shaped frame.
Keith whispered to Rissa: "How long can the pod survive without the
pump?"
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